Trouble Falling Asleep Part 2

The floating fortress drifted silently through the endless night, its towering metal walls casting long, eerie shadows across its corridors. Without the sun, time had fractured—morning and evening had lost meaning, leaving behind only artificial cycles dictated by flickering stars and failing satellites.

This wasn’t home. Home was a memory of golden sunlight and open skies, a ghost that haunted our dreams. This metal behemoth, adrift in the endless night, was merely a vessel, carrying the remnants of a lost world.

I pulled my hood tighter over my head as I crawled on the ground. If I was careful, I could get to Aiden without being seen. But that was easier said than done. The metal corridors were a maze, shifting beneath my feet as the fortress adjusted its trajectory through the sky. I edged around a bend, the recycled air thick with the metallic tang of the fortress’s lifeblood – its failing machinery. And froze.

Two guards, their uniforms stark against the dim emergency lighting, stood blocking the main thoroughfare to the lower levels. Their posture was relaxed, but the tension in their shoulders, the way their hands instinctively hovered near the energy weapons holstered at their hips, spoke of a constant state of alert.

“Did you hear about Zone E?” one of them murmured, his voice low and conspiratorial.

“The scientist? Kotton? Yeah, something about him cracking fusion. Heard it’s big.”

My breath hitched in my throat. Zone E…that’s where they’d taken Dad. Were they finally admitting what he’d accomplished?

The second guard scoffed, a harsh, humorless sound. “Big and stupid, if you ask me. Playing God with artificial suns? The government should have vaporized his toys the second they laid their hands on them. It’s unnatural.”

“Unnatural?” The first guard chuckled, a low, rumbling sound. “More like the damn miracle we need. If Kotton pulls this off, we won’t be living in the dark anymore. We won’t need their rationing and their rules.”

A beat of silence hung in the recycled air, heavy with unspoken implications.

Then— “Exactly. That’s why they’ll never let it happen.”

A cold dread seeped into my bones. Dad wasn’t just a brilliant scientist they wanted to exploit. He was a threat to their authority, a potential liberator they needed to silence.

A restless stirring in my pocket. The tiny hamster, usually content to doze in the warmth, stowaway where I least expected. Nutmeg's presence could be felt as his small claws scrabbling against the fabric of my worn trousers. He landed with a soft thump on the cold metal floor and, with a surprising burst of energy, darted forward – directly towards the guards’ boots.

My stomach plummeted. “No! Nutmeg, no, no, no!”

“Hey, what the hell was that?” one of the guards snapped, his head whipping around.

My breath caught in my throat. They were looking my way. The dim light glinted off their weapons.

Instinct, raw and primal, took over. I lunged forward, a desperate grab, scooping up Nutmeg just as the guards took a step closer, their suspicion ignited.

Seconds. I had mere seconds before they spotted me, before my desperate mission ended before it even began. If they caught me now, I’d be locked down, interrogated. Aiden would remain out of reach, and the truth about Dad would stay buried. Then, a low, rhythmic rolling sound began to echo down the corridor, growing steadily louder. It sounded more mechanical than something physically getting knocked over.

“Damn it, what was that?” one of the guards muttered, his attention momentarily diverted.

A metallic sphere, roughly the size of a large melon, slowly tumbled into view, its polished surface reflecting the dim emergency lights. As it rolled closer, a section of its surface whirred open, revealing a dark lens that seemed to fixate directly on me. It was unnerving, as if the sphere itself was observing me, assessing the situation. Then, an electric current began to sputter from its hatch.

"Ughh..."

A heavy thud echoed as the first guard crumpled to the floor.

“Are we under attack…” the second guard stammered, turning to his fallen comrade, his hand instinctively reaching for his weapon.

But before he could react, a second metallic sphere rolled into view, mirroring the first. A thin, almost invisible dart shot out from its opening, striking the remaining guard in the neck. He gasped, his eyes widening in surprise and pain before he collapsed beside his partner.

“That was a bit close for comfort,” a voice drawled from the shadows of a side corridor.

The two metallic spheres whirred open completely, revealing tiny, blinking eyes. Two hamsters, miniature pilots in their metallic steeds, scurried out of their hatch. And then, Aiden stepped into the dim light, his wild, gravity-defying hair illuminated by the flickering emergency lamps. His gaze, sharp and assessing, met mine across the silent, fallen figures.

Moving quietly I began to follow Aiden back to his room.

Stepping into his sleeping corridors was like entering a different world, a chaotic symphony of scientific ambition and teenage rebellion. Scraps of discarded inventions littered every surface, competing for space with half-eaten meals and stacks of dusty textbooks. The air hummed with the low thrum of experimental energy, a constant reminder of Aiden's restless mind. Yet, despite the familiar disarray, a subtle undercurrent of tension thrummed beneath the surface, a forced normalcy that felt…wrong.

And then there was the poster.

A massive, garish image of a woman with impossible curves and a come-hither gaze dominated one wall, a stark and jarring contrast to the scientific madness that reigned supreme in the rest of the room. It was so utterly out of place, so deliberately provocative, that it felt like a deliberate act of defiance against the sterile, utilitarian aesthetic of the fortress.

I wrinkled my nose in disgust, trying to ignore the way Nutmeg and his two miniature companions, now perched precariously on Aiden’s shoulder, seemed fascinated by the image.

“You could at least try to maintain a semblance of scientific decorum,” I muttered, pointedly refusing to sit on his cluttered bed.

Aiden smirked, tossing a handful of hamster treats into the air. The tiny creatures scrambled to catch them, their tiny claws clicking against the metal of his lab coat. “Oh, but where’s the fun in that?” he teased, his gaze flickering over me with a hint of amusement. “Did you come here seeking a heartfelt confession? Or perhaps some…laxatives to levitate that stubbornly rigid attitude of yours?”

I gritted my teeth, fighting back the urge to throttle him. His flippant attitude, his casual dismissal of the gravity of the situation, felt like a deliberate provocation.

“I didn’t come here for jokes, Aiden,” I snapped, my voice tight with barely suppressed anger. “Franny said you could help me find Dad.”

His fingers, which had been toying with a test tube filled with a bubbling, iridescent liquid, paused for a fraction of a second. But then he resumed his tinkering, his attention seemingly focused on the strange concoction. He acted as if my words had been nothing more than background noise.

"Just because I can doesn't mean I have to," Aiden's indifference stung.

It was a familiar sting, the same cold disregard I’d felt from the government, from the elites who had hoarded resources and abandoned the surface world to its fate. The way he acted like my father’s disappearance was some distant, inconsequential problem, a mere distraction from his own scientific pursuits…it felt like a betrayal.

I clenched my fists, my nails digging into my palms. “You’re just like the rest of them,” I hissed, my voice trembling with a mixture of anger and despair. “When people need help, you pretend not to notice. When the sun exploded, the rich hid away in their bunkers, thinking their money would save them. When their supplies ran out, they had no idea how to adapt, how to survive. They were useless. And now you’re acting like this isn’t your problem.”

Aiden sighed, finally turning to face me. He studied me for a long moment, and for once, his smirk was gone.

Aiden sighed, a long, drawn-out sound that spoke of exasperation. He finally turned to face me, his expression uncharacteristically serious. He studied me for a long moment, his usual smirk replaced by a guarded intensity.

“I’ll ask you something, then,” he said, his voice quieter now, the teasing edge gone. “What if your father isn’t trapped, Delia? What if he’s working on something so important, so world-changing, that stopping him would…undo everything?”

The words hung in the air between us, heavy and suffocating. A seed of doubt, cold and unwelcome, sprouted in my mind.

I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry. “I…” I had no answer. No way to refute his question, no logical justification for my desperate urgency. My need to find Dad, to see him again, was driven by emotion, by fear, not by reason.

My vision blurred, the edges of the room softening as memories, unwelcome and painful, clawed their way to the surface. The explosion, the sky tearing apart like a wound, the suffocating darkness that had followed. My mother disappearing into the chaos, her last words a desperate plea to protect Lumina. Lumina, burning up with fever in the aftermath, her small body wracked with chills, too weak to move. I had thought I was going to lose her too. And now Dad…he was somewhere out there, and I kept resenting him for not being here, for not being the anchor I desperately needed.

I squeezed my eyes shut, fighting back the tears that threatened to spill. “Whether or not Dad is busy, whether or not he’s working on something ‘world-changing’…he would never forget about us,” I whispered, my voice cracking with emotion. “I know I’m being selfish…I know my urgency is driven by fear…but please, Aiden. Just…take me to him.”

The silence stretched between us, thick with unspoken anxieties and the weight of my plea.

Aiden let out a long, weary sigh, rubbing his temple as if I was the most exhausting puzzle he’d ever encountered. But then—without another word, without a single sarcastic retort or scientific explanation—he moved.

He reached out, his fingers brushing against the edge of the garish poster. With a sharp tug, he pulled it aside, revealing a hidden passage concealed behind the wall. A narrow, dimly lit opening that led into the unknown depths of the fortress.

I stared, my breath catching in my throat. The garish poster, a symbol of Aiden's defiant eccentricity, had been hiding a secret. A clue to the person behind the lab coat.